In approximately 2015, a man bought a house in the Canadian province of Quebec. Nothing remarkable about that, I agree. But it was what he discovered in an antique wooden chest, in a sealed up section of the property’s attic, that piqued the gentleman’s interest. Inside were 87 letters written by a man named Edward… Read More

On 2 August 1947, a British South American Airways (BSAA) Avro Lancastrian airliner, named Star Dust, departed from Buenos Aires Airport, Argentina, at 1.46pm, bound for Santiago, Chile. At 5.41pm, the aircraft sent a message in Morse code to Santiago Airport, predicting an arrival time of 5.45pm. That time came and went without any sign… Read More

As an entrepreneur, Timothy Dexter was either extremely shrewd or extremely fortunate. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Unites States on 22 January 1747, his first acquisition was definitely shrewd, if somewhat unromantic. In 1769, aged just 22, he married Elizabeth Frothingham, a wealthy widow ten years his senior, who owned her own house. However, his newly… Read More

Before leaving the subject of death in Victorian times entirely behind, the following is an astonishing story that encompasses two of the era’s greatest fears; namely the dread of being buried alive, and the scourge of grave robbers. The following account first appeared in The Encyclopaedia of Death and Life in the Spirit-world, by John… Read More

On a Sunday morning on 11 June 1876, a police officer had just popped into a hotel in Lafayette, Indiana, United States, called the Lahr House, for refreshment, when a chambermaid, pale and breathless, suddenly interrupted his repose. The young lady had been attending to her duties, cleaning and servicing the hotel’s guest rooms, when… Read More

To refer to Robert E. Cornish as a scientific child prodigy would be a slight exaggeration, but only just. Born in San Francisco, California, United States in 1903, he had completed high school by the age of 15 and went on to graduate from Berkley just three years later. By the age of 21 he… Read More

On Friday 18 October 2013, a violin sold at an auction in Wiltshire, England for £900,000 ($1,457,000). It was not one of the famous Stradivarius instruments, in fact it was not even a particularly high quality violin, just an average old fiddle. It’s condition also left much to be desired. The metalwork had rusted, and… Read More

Ada Constance Kent was an English actress who enjoyed a degree of success in both stage and screen productions in the early decades of the twentieth century. Given her relative fame at the time, it is rather surprising that comparatively little seems to be known about her early life. Ada was born around 1880, and… Read More

On 5 March 1963, Aeroflot Flight 191, a U.S.S.R domestic passenger flight from Vnukovo International Airport, was attempting to land at Ashgabat International Airport in a dust storm. Owing to the weather conditions the flight ought to have been diverted elsewhere, however the option to divert was neither suggested by air traffic control nor requested… Read More

On 13 February 1936, a passer-by spotted a mangled corpse, lying on rocks in shallow water, underneath the Morandi Bridge in the Italian city of Catanzaro. The body was quickly identified as that of Giuseppe “Pepe” Veraldi, a local young man. Despite protestations from the man’s family that he had been in good spirits and… Read More